East Getting Your Vehicle In and Out of
Many CountriesPictures of the carnets and details
about carnets

Vehicle
Maintenance

Checklists.

Gear
Selection

What should I bring? Everyone has a tendency
to bring too much stuff. Just remember, many of the places you visit are
more populated than your home. And more people means they probably have
what you need so, consider getting items you need on the road. After days
of carrying your pack around, sifting through items you never use to find
the few that you rely on, you might also conclude that less is better.
Take a look at the Gear We Brought and the Vehicle Spare Parts
list to see what we found useful.

Developing
a Travelogue web site

Developing a process for producing AroundTheWorld1999
was one of the most critical elements of this projects success and it
took a long time. If this was to be a travel oriented web site we needed
to focus our efforts on the area of the site that would contain the majority
of our content. This was a set of pages we call the Route and Journal.
If this was to be an educational web site we needed to also focus on delivering
kid-friendly content that is salient to our audience. This spurred the
ask a question link. We quickly realized that like a business, we needed
a mission statement to keep our focus so one night, Nick came up with
this:

Our Mission:Itıs a good idea to go into something like this with some understanding
of what you want to get out of it. Our mission is basically to see neat
stuff and, in so doing, to spark the idea of world travel into the minds
of young people. We targeting elementary school, 5th grade up including
High School and College. -To let Americans know that foreign travel to
other countries (like Iran for example) is safe. We have our media to
thank for all the fear but realize that most of it exists to sell us things.
To offer reference and research material for adventurers, travelers, vehicle
overlanders, and expeditions. To provide adventurous and entertaining
reading for Land Rover owners and vehicle off-road enthusiasts. To encourage
and educate anyone considering a vehicle based overland expedition. Please
contact us if you need help.
-To recruit a team for our next expedition; AroundTheWorld2001: LONGITUDE!
-To encourage people to follow their dreams. Sappy but itıs true. Stop
watching other people live their lives and go live your own!

Building The Web site Infrastructure to
Support an ExpeditionWe could have hosted our site on a shared virtual server. There are
many travel sites that will host your travelogues for you and most of
them are free. However, we decided to host our own web site. The infrastructure
for AroundTheWorld1999.com includes server hardware and software that
runs the actual web site. We built our own server at home using a old
homemade Pentium system and a DSL line. It didnıt have to be powerful
but it had to be reliable and remote administration was especially important.
One thing that you get with your own machine is flexibility and control
so you can experiment. Key features we wanted:
- Web Server
- Mail Server
- remote access (telnet for remote systems admin.)

The server hardware is nothing special: a Pentium 200MHz with 64 megabytes
of RAM and a 10 gig hard drive. It was thrown together using bits and
pieces of hardware that were lying around.

Several months before we left, the machine
was setup. After formatting the drive we installed FreeBSD. It was quick
and easy. Simply download two floppies, boot, and perform an "Internet
Installation" which grabs the OS pre-installation files using FTP. How
cool; The OS downloads and installs itself. Itıs easy and itıs free! Within
an hour we had Apache web server, SendMail, FTP, and DNS configured and
running. Everything you need to host domains, web services, remote admin.,
file transfer and e-mail. With stability to boot. In one year of uptime
it has been rebooted it five times and never due to system failure. I
like Windows NT because it pays the bills. In fact, I know more about
the Windows environment having worked extensively with Internet Information
Server and all versions of Microsoft Exchange but you just canıt beat
a Unix solution for Internet applications. System stability and remote
administration widens the gap even further. Where weıre going we wonıt
be around to reboot Windows NT server every week.

I highly recommend this combination. Especially if you want to learn more
about all aspects of web publishing. For better and worse, you will have
total control over everything. Just make sure you have a friend back home
occasionally checking the system and a "plan B" in case of system failure.
.